Development of underdevelopment
저발전의 발전
The thesis Andre Gunder Frank put forward in his 1966 article of that title: underdevelopment is not the survival of pre-capitalist structures but the result that a single capitalist world system produced in its satellites (the periphery) in the very process of developing its metropoles (the core). Today's developed countries were once "undeveloped" but never "underdeveloped"; underdevelopment is the product of a chain through which metropoles expropriate the surplus of their satellites. It led to the claim that Latin America had been capitalist since colonial times and set off a dispute over revolutionary strategy.
In depth
How is the undeveloped different from the underdeveloped?
"Underdevelopment" is usually taken to mean not yet developed. Frank turned that common sense around. His view can be summed up in the four theses Ernesto Laclau set out in 1971.
First, it is false that every country develops through the same succession of stages and that today's underdeveloped nations are at a stage the developed countries passed long ago. Today's developed capitalist countries were once undeveloped, but never underdeveloped in the sense that today's poor countries are. Second, contemporary underdevelopment is not a simple reflection of the country's own economic, political and cultural structures but in large part the historical product of relations between the underdeveloped satellite and today's developed countries. Third, the "dualist" view, which holds that underdeveloped societies have a modern sector integrated into capitalism and an isolated feudal or pre-capitalist sector, each with its own dynamic, is an illusion: the expansion of capitalism over the past centuries penetrated even the most isolated sectors. Fourth, metropolis–satellite relations are not limited to the international level but run through the dependent countries themselves, creating sub-metropoles within them to which the interior regions are satellites.
In Frank's words, to extract the fruits of their labour through monopoly trade, "no less than in the times of Cortez and Pizarro in Mexico and Peru, Clive in India, Rhodes in Africa, the 'Open Door' in China", the metropoles destroyed or totally transformed the earlier social and economic systems of these societies, and the resulting fate of those societies "was and remains their decapitalization, structurally generated unproductiveness, ever increasing misery for the masses—in a word, their underdevelopment".
How does the metropolis–satellite chain work?
Frank drew a chain along which surplus is pulled ever upwards. In a simplified illustration: the surplus a sharecropper produces in the rural interior passes to the merchants and landlords of the provincial town, the town's surplus to the export houses and banks of the capital, and the capital's surplus to firms and investors in London or New York. Every link is a metropolis to those below it and a satellite to those above. As Frank put it, "The metropolis expropriates economic surplus from its satellites and appropriates it for its own economic development. The satellites remain underdeveloped for lack of access to their own surplus and as a consequence of the same polarization and exploitative contradictions which the metropolis introduces and maintains in the satellite's domestic structure."
Development and underdevelopment are thus "the opposite faces of the same coin". They are not the products of different economic structures or systems but results that "one and the same historical process of the expansion and development of capitalism throughout the world" generated and still generates at once. Frank located the origins of capitalism in a world "commercial network" that spread from Italian cities such as Venice, and later Iberian and northwestern European towns, in the fifteenth century until the whole globe was incorporated into a single mercantile capitalist system.
What was at stake politically?
The thesis was not only academic. As Laclau set out, the Latin American left of the 1960s was sharply divided over whether the continent's societies were feudal or capitalist. Those who saw them as feudal held that they had not yet reached a capitalist stage and stood on the eve of a bourgeois-democratic revolution that would break feudal stagnation, so that socialists should ally with the national bourgeoisie in a united front against the oligarchy and imperialism; this was the line of many communist parties. Those who held that Latin America had been fully incorporated into the world market in the colonial period, and so had been capitalist from its inception, thought it meaningless to postulate a future stage of capitalist development and argued for fighting directly for socialism against a bourgeoisie wholly integrated with imperialism. Frank was the best-known defender of the second view. He lived in Latin America from 1962, took part as a professor at the University of Chile in the reforms of the Allende government, and fled to Europe after the 1973 coup.
What did Laclau and Brenner object to?
In "Feudalism and Capitalism in Latin America" (New Left Review, 1971) the Argentine Ernesto Laclau pointed out that, for all their apparent opposition, the two positions agreed on one fundamental point: both defined "capitalism" and "feudalism" by phenomena in the sphere of commodity exchange rather than production, making the presence or absence of a link with the market the decisive criterion. Laclau held that this was alien to Marxist theory, for which feudalism and capitalism are above all modes of production. An estate that sells grain or silver on the world market while producing with forced labour may be capitalist when seen through exchange but not when seen through its relations of production.
In "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism" (1977) the American historian Robert Brenner called the method of Frank and Wallerstein "neo-Smithian". Adam Smith thought that the growth of trade and the division of labour bring economic development of themselves; these Marxists, Brenner argued, merely inverted that optimism, saying that the same market processes enforce backwardness in the periphery, while keeping its individualistic and mechanistic presuppositions, and so built its "mirror image". In Brenner's account they failed to see that class structures, once established, determine the course of development or underdevelopment over a whole epoch, and that those class structures emerge from class struggles whose results cannot be understood in terms of market forces alone. Without free wage labour, in which labour power is a commodity, there can be no capital accumulation on an extended scale: that is Brenner's point.
Where did the thesis lead?
Immanuel Wallerstein took the development of underdevelopment into world-systems theory as one of its components. Samir Amin used the same name for the process by which stagnant accumulation and low wages in the periphery are fixed by a global law of value, and Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa applied the same concern to Africa. Frank himself turned to world history from the 1980s, arguing that there is only one world system and that it formed no later than the fourth millennium BC, and in ReOrient (1998) he held that its centre had long been in Asia, especially China. That sets him far apart from Wallerstein, who places the beginning of the modern world-system in the "long sixteenth century".